....could they really eventually die from lead poisoning?
shareThere are people living with bullets that could not be removed. It doesn't seem to shorten their lives.
To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.
My grandfather has (had) some shrapnel in him from his US Army service during WW2. He said they got out the big pieces and the small pieces sitting next to vital organs. The rest they left behind. Some of it slowly worked it's way out of his body over time. Others stayed put. He lived to be 92, so it had no apparent ill effect on him - unless he was otherwise meant to live to 106.
shareI've shot x-rays on a lot of guys who come into the ER where there are rounds perhaps ten or twelve years old.
One guy came in after an auto accident and one of the other techs asked me "what are those?" I didn't understand her question exactly and said "that's a forty-five, these two are forties and these two are nines". She was asking what they were, not the caliber. Both forties had expanded close to 100%, the forty-five appeared to be a slighty compressed FMJ and one nine was most certainly a Hydra-Shok, you could see the post.
The moral of all of this is that the human body doesn't like inanimate foreigners and tends to encapsulate them with a fibrogen. If the object is in conact with a bone it may even result in a calus (kay lus).